PEpella·Aug 31, 2024Submission
Balanced Employee IP Agreement (BEIPA 2.0) (2020)
3 points · Open discussiongithub
balanced-employee-ip-agreement
OPEN SOURCE2017–2024
github / balanced-employee-ip-agreement
balanced-employee-ip-agreement
GitHub's employee intellectual property agreement, open sourced and reusable
17Distinct people
17Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.3KGitHub stars
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What it is
GitHub's employee intellectual property agreement, open sourced and reusable
GitHub
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
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Mentions over time
HN mentions by year17 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-03-21 12:11:15 UTC to 2024-08-31 08:08:14 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
17 sourcesGitHub's employee intellectual property agreement, open sourced and reusable
42 points · Open discussionI've managed to get specific exclusions for IP I've worked on as a side project, and more recently got my employer to include the majority of the github "balanced employee ip agreement" [1] in our employment contracts, which states quite clearly "If you create IP outside the scope of your employment or contract or before or after your employment or contract ("Your IP"), the Company doesn't own it" [2]
(UK based company)
[1] https://github.blog/2017-03-21-work-life-balance-in-employee...
[2] https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement/blo...
In Ask HN: How to validate a startup idea whilst employed?I had to deal with this recently. Apparently these are "standard templates".
I hired a lawyer to rewrite that section to have a clearly split for side stuff and the company's stuff as well as the other invention assignment sections. See github's for an example of a fair agreement https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement). The company accepted it and everyone was happy.
If the company doesn't accept that they have no business taking ownership of completely unrelated stuff you do outside of work hours find another company to work for, they clearly don't care about you as a person.
In Ask HN: Should a 'no side projects' policy be taken seriously?I worked for a company and they wanted to do something similar, I think they went with something boilerplate or some suggestions from an attorney. I suggested a compromise and we use something akin to the [GitHub Balanced Employee Intellectual Property Agreement (BEIPA)](https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement/blo...).
I'm not sure if in your circumstance they would go for it, but it worked out for me. Here is the github blog post - https://github.blog/2017-03-21-work-life-balance-in-employee...
In NDA - Company Wants Ownership of Every Idea or Invention I've ever hadGitHub's Balanced Employee IP Agreement
2 points · Open discussionI think this is reasonable advice, in some settings. But for many of us, I think it’s just not practical anymore.
The lines have become too blurred. I work from home, I have one office and one desk. The computer on the desk was purchased by my company but other stuff wasn’t like my mouse or my iPad. I have work Slack on my phone, which is my personal phone. I know I should be, but I’m just not that careful anymore about what I do where.
Granted, I work for a startup. It’s a MBP they had shipped directly from Apple to me. I set it up and configured it myself.
The GitHub Balanced Employee IP Agreement acknowledges that this distinction is arbitrary and unhelpful:
> In California the main difference made by BEIPA is that IP developed with company equipment or relating to the company's business, but in an employee's free time and which the em
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ployee is not involved in as an employee, is not owned by the company (but the company does get a non-exclusive and unlimited license if the IP relates to the company's business). This recognizes that from the employee perspective, segregating one's life activities based on ownership of devices at hand or relatedness to an employer's potentially vast range of business that an individual employee is not involved with as an employee imposes significant cognitive overhead and often doesn't happen in practice, whatever agreements state.
- https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement
I hope that more employee agreements move this direction so we can stop trying to enforce this distinction.
GitHub's employee intellectual property agreement
1 points · Open discussionThis is one of several reasons I left Apple and went to GitHub. I wanted to have the ability to work on side projects, but Apple makes that very, very, hard.
GitHub on the other hand is explicit about allowing this in its balanced employee IP agreement, which is pretty nice - https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement
In Apple Was Headed for a Slump. Then It Had One of the Biggest Rallies EverSee if your employer would be open to using GitHub's open source employee IP agreement: https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement.
It's a bit more balanced than the standard IP Agreements most tech companies are using.
In Ask HN: How to save your side projects from your Employers?Ask HN: What happened to BEIPA now that GitHub is part of Microsoft?
BEIPA: https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13921433
Is it still in effect? Has it been just a PR stunt all along?
2 points · Open discussionGitHub has one, though I can't vouch for details: https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement
In Ask HN: Employer 'Outside work' agreementsAsk HN: Ability to commit to open source projects I use at work at work
At my current job, I work on applications of machine learning to our data. Sometimes the existing machine learning libraries don't have abilities we need, and often in this cases, the best way to solve the problem is to add modifications to the library itself. However, it is not feasible to maintain private forks because the libraries we use change very fast and to keep them updated it would also be necessary to maintain the fork, which is something that would require additional resources.
So, the best approach for this kind of problems is to create pull requests to the libraries and get them pulled into upstream, so that they can maintain the code and we can use the code maintained by them and have all features we need without private forks.
I would like to just implement the required changes and create PRs when necessary, then use the u
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pstream libraries in my work. However, my agreement (expectably) says that all the code that I create at work belongs to the employer, so right now I'm trying to create PRs on weekends to not get into troubles. My boss agrees that it is a problem and said that we can modify my agreement.
Although I understand that I need a lawyer the country where the company is registered to do actual modification of the agreement in a lawful way, I'm curious how is this kind of problems is solved in other companies and what keywords can be used to get more information about this.
I find GitHub's Balanced Employee Intellectual Property Agreement [1] somewhat close to what I want, but I find it to be not exactly clear that it would allow me to commit to open source projects that I use at work because in my understanding each feature that I might add to an open source project and then use in the company's code base can be counted as "(ii) developed for use by the Company".
[1] https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement/blob/master/Balanced_Empl…
Here's the repo, hosting the documents - https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement
In GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resourcesShowing the 15 most recent of 17 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.